Ride Sourcing Service In China: Comparing Experienced And Potential Customers

This research aims to predict users' behavioral intention to use the service and identify what factors play the most important role in decision-making process by comparing two groups of passengers: “experienced customers” and “potential customers” using the Technology Acceptance model and Partial Least Squire Algorithm..It is expected that our research could shed light on how to offer better ride sharing service and attract more users.Data collection is conducted by spreading self-administrated questionnaires online and field in this study.As a result,a total of 562 valid responses were filtered to subsequent data analysis,250 for experienced group and 312 for potential segment.In our model framework,system quality(SQ),perceived enjoyment(PE),perceived environmental friendliness(PEF)and objective usability(OU)are external variables.Besides external variables,which were chosen by researcher,model also consists of variables,which belong to original TAM components,they are: perceived usefulness(PU),perceived ease of use(PEOU),attitude(ATT)and behavioral intention(BI).The SEM results showed us that our proposed research model sufficiently explains users' adoption of ride sharing.Consistent with previous technology acceptance studies of specific systems or services,the survey data supported some casual connections in the TAM.Results showed some similarities and differences in hypotheses test support.For potential customers the main factors that have direct effect on behavioral intention are attitude and objective usability.For experienced consumers only attitude has a significant direct effect on intention to use ride sourcing service.The influence of customers' attitude towards their intention for experienced group is bigger(0.551)than for inexperienced group(0.533).The core determinants of Attitude are OU,SQ and PE for both observed groups.As explained in structural results of this study,our findings implicate that providers of ride sharing system and services should pay attention to perception and perspectives of both experienced and potential customers to encourage continual usage and involve more consumers of ride sharing system and services.To meet customers' requirements the manufactures and providers should focus on providing not only high-quality and high-stability system,but also immediate feedback at the user interface.From an academic standpoint,the research model may be further improved and utilized to determine users' preconceptions of ride sharing systems.The TAM could be further improved and developed as a main idea by combining psychological factors of users.